If
you want to fix America, you have to fix America’s broken education
system; and you must start by getting rid of the one we have.

I’ve
been up in front of too many classrooms in too many different schools,
and had lunch in too many different teachers’ lounges, to be wrong
about this. I have also sat through more school board meetings, in more
towns, and pored over more school budgets, than I care to remember.

Here
are a few suggestions for getting out from under the costliest and least
effective education establishment in human history.

De-certify
the teachers’ unions, like Ronald Reagan de-certified the
air traffic controllers’ union. The politics, admittedly, will be
difficult, but there are two compelling reasons for doing this.

First,
we have an education crisis. Or, to put it another way, the education
provided by these unions stinks. And they oppose any reform that anyone
has ever thought of. Second—we can’t afford it anymore! Teacher
salaries, benefits, and pensions are driving states toward bankruptcy.
(The other public employees’ unions are part of this financial crisis,
too: but unlike teachers, they haven’t been able to convince anyone
that their work is necessary. Nor does Hollywood ever make a movie about
the superhuman achievements of a great clerk at the Division of Motor
Vehicles. Teachers have always had great P.R.)

Democrat
politicians sign sweetheart deals with teacher unions because a big chunk
of that money gets kicked back into their political campaigns. So a lot
of the money you pay in school taxes goes to elect people who always raise
your taxes.

Abolish
the U.S. Department of Education. This keepsake from the Jimmy
Carter presidency has no business being there. The Constitution gives
the federal government no warrant to be involved in education. Do you
really want Anthony Wiener having any way to get his hands on your child’s
education?

Abolish
the state education departments. These nests of wooden-headed
bureaucrats and screwball “education” theorists have done
infinite mischief. How often I’ve heard local school board members
groaning and cursing over the latest unfunded mandate dropped on their
heads by the state! No mas, no mas…

Grant
absolute autonomy to local school boards—you know, like
they used to have. These are people whose constituents live next door
to them and run into them at the supermarket. It would be a brave local
board member indeed—maybe even a suicidal one—who dared to
squander his neighbors’ hard-earned money on “gender coaches”
for the kindergarten, or sign a mind-blowing contract with the teachers
that allowed them to retire at 55 and spend the next 20 years going on
Caribbean cruises while the poor devils who pay for it have to work until
they drop. Local board members will also feel pressure to ensure a quality
education—far more than any bigwig in Washington or the state capital
will ever be exposed to.

Abolish
the requirement for teacher certification. Catholic school teachers,
for the most part, aren’t certified, and they teach rings around
their public school counterparts. Teacher certification programs are nothing
but a job bank for the teachers’ colleges, and a final opportunity
to indoctrinate would-be teachers into far-Left politics. And you pay
for it.

Give
tax breaks to parents who home-school or send their kids to private school.
America is full of overcrowded, under-performing school districts where
the per-pupil cost hovers around $20,000 a year. Some of those schools
are a bad joke at best, and a tragedy at worst. It’s inconceivable
that parents could be even less successful in educating children. And
the high performance statistics of home-schoolers are too well-known and
too easily verifiable to allow for any reasonable argument against home-schooling.

Encourage
churches to set up in-house schools and courses. Boy, won’t
the teachers’ unions love that! Watch them spin their heads around
and levitate. But churches are already in position to help congregation
members who for one reason or another can’t home-school, and either
can’t afford or can’t get access to a decent private school.
Churches already have various day-care and after-school care programs.
It shouldn’t be hard to build on those.

All
of what we are proposing here is tried and true. It’s all been done
before. After all, public schooling wasn’t even invented until well
into the 19th century.

Surely
we can get along without the unions fixed like tapeworms to our paychecks;
without a federal Dept. of Education that was only created in 1979; without
state educrats forcing local school districts to spend money that they
don’t have; without teacher certification programs that are of no
demonstrable benefit to anyone but those who provide them; and without
failing schools that cost us $20,000 a year per child—where the
superintendent and the assorted assistant superintendents have district
paid-for cars and credit cards, the kids never learn how to read, and
the toilets don’t flush. You’ve all seen such things on the
nightly news.

Subscribe
to the NewsWithViews Daily News Alerts!

Enter
Your E-Mail Address:

If even
a few of the above recommendations were adopted, we would have better
schooling at a lower cost—which guarantees that the teachers’
unions will oppose them all.

Yes,
I know—the public schools were better in the days of “Our
Miss Brooks,” they weren’t that awful when the kids from “Leave
It to Beaver” went there. A couple of decades of teacher certification
programs and ultra-leftist union leaders have done their work only too
well, and the schools are that awful now.

Lee Duigon,
a contributing editor with the Chalcedon Foundation, is a former newspaper
reporter and editor, small businessman, teacher, and horror novelist.
He has been married to his wife, Patricia, for 34 years. See his new
fantasy/adventure novels, Bell Mountain and The Cellar Beneath the Cellar,
available on www.amazon.com